


Speak Softly

by Sabulum



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, M/M, Miscommunication, Not Thor: The Dark World Compliant, On the Run, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Warning: Loki
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-11
Updated: 2014-08-11
Packaged: 2018-02-12 17:00:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2117775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sabulum/pseuds/Sabulum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky doesn't know what he's doing in New York. Neither does Loki. But Loki has a plan, and that never ends well for anyone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Speak Softly

**Author's Note:**

> My fic for the Marvel RarePair Exchange! Gifted to [casandloki](http://casandloki.tumblr.com/), who mentioned the prospect of Bucky/Loki... and I, loving the both of them individually, was intrigued. I proceeded to run wildly with it and get extremely ahead of myself, so this one will be multi-chaptered. :P
> 
> This isn't what I wanted to have prepared—I didn't get to revise _nearly_ as much as I'd like—but unfortunately, real life hit me in the face. I'll definitely edit this at a later date, but for now, here it is! The beginning of a beautiful friendship.
> 
> Or something.

The Soldier is alone.

Though HYDRA's web tries to close around him again, the Soldier is clever and patient. He hides.

In those first days after he decides to flee, a team of five is sent to retrieve the Asset. To bring him in, he knows, for recalibration. The Soldier is armed only with a handgun, then; plays cat and mouse with them, picking them off over the course of several hours, their chase winding from the streets up onto the rooftops; and in the and he stands over two corpses, the agents having cornered him, stares down at them and feels hunted.

The Soldier doesn't know what he wants, but it _isn't_ to go back to them.

He takes what he can use from their bodies, leaving the rest to be collected by the next recovery team. Then he disappears.

— — —

Without a goal in mind, he takes to the streets.

Often, for lack of anything better to do, he'll sit and think of the Mission that he failed. That he abandoned.

The blond Captain who'd known him—who _he'd_ known, in brief flashes of jumbled memory—the whole reason he's in this mess—is frustrating to him. Driven by a hazy fear of _something_ that he can't recall, the Soldier picks at his memories like a scab until they're raw and inflamed. Then he continues, frustrated, even when his skull aches and his pulse pounds in his temples with the force of his migraine. That man feels so, incredibly important, but the Soldier doesn't know _why_. Doesn't know who Steve Rogers is.

Doesn't know why he's _afraid_.

There are days when he aches to track the Captain down, hoping he might bring answers to even some of his questions. In the end, though, he shies away. Instead, he makes a slow, winding trek of the city, letting the crowds think he's a part of them, drifting even when the loneliness starts to chafe. Even when, after a certain number of days, he starts to feel exposed. The Soldier thinks he hasn't been on his own like this in a long time, and part of him relishes the freedom even as he's terrified of it.

What is he supposed to do now?

There is only one familiar option: report back to his handlers. vetoing that, he doesn't know.

He even dares to ask what James Barnes would do. But the Soldier doesn't know that man beyond an exhibit, beyond the knowledge of his name, and doesn't think he could be him anyway, so he abandons that thought. The Soldier will have to make his own way.

Three HYDRA agents later, he gives up finding refuge in homeless shelters. He holes up in warehouses instead, where workers have left for the night and no-one is around to get caught in the crossfire; protects people whose names he doesn't even know, whose faces he's barely glimpsed. Leaves a trail of mangled agents in his wake. Constantly moving.

It helps, too, to be alone when he has nightmares.

Without a goal in mind, the Soldier pickpockets thugs for money—a skill he's oddly familiar with, for some reason—until a voice in the back of his mind starts to chastise him, and he stops. The thought of stealing doesn't bother the Soldier, but something drives him to be more than a petty criminal, to find purpose, to do _more_.

So, for lack of a better option, he finds work.

— — —

The Soldier swiftly realizes: something terrible has happened to this city.

He picks up fragments of history, here and there. Suicide bombings. An invasion. Wide-spread panic, with words like "aliens" and "terrorism" spoken casually side-by-side, until the stories are hard to make sense of past the grief. People walk around with shadows in their eyes; he passes by memorials, by swathes of damage that no-one has yet repaired, and he questions. As it turns out, entire neighborhoods are being overlooked in the repair efforts, and the Soldier walks many of them with a curious sort of detachment at how this could happen to a city. To a _people_.

Though he doesn't know all their stories, the Soldier finds something familiar in these beaten-down neighborhoods.

In all honesty, the Soldier doesn't know what the hell he's doing. But he sees flashes of memory, sometimes, when he walks among this city, and he _wants_ those. He wants to know who that scrawny blond kid was, and why he sees him running in these streets; wants to know why some idiot with a too-big heart bared his throat, even when the Soldier would've killed him; wants to know why the Soldier envisions him as _always_ , and why that thought drives him so much.

The people of this city, too, haven't stopped, even with so many of them on the ropes, and the Soldier feels fiercely protective of them for that.

The Soldier joins the repair efforts.

— — —

It's good work. Honest, hard work. It does nothing for his confusion or his scattered mind, but at the very least it washes the taste of HYDRA from his mouth, and so the Soldier throws his time into it above all. He spends the days volunteering his hands, or occasionally giving the run-around to the agents who tail him; he spends his nights sleeping in warehouses and back-alleys, and when he wakes in those places, his screaming disturbs no-one. And he's vigilant, always, never to sleep where he works. He does his best to steer HYDRA away from those places of construction and rebuilding and hope; therefore, he also does his best not to taint them with his troubled mind. He throws himself headfirst into helping them and _fixing_.

But he tires. And the days grow long, sometimes.

It takes the Soldier too long—embarrassingly long; almost an hour, in fact—to realize that he's being followed.

In fairness, he'd been hauling lumber all day with a group of teenagers. They'd wanted all the information they could get on this man who'd wandered into their midst, and answering their prying questions had been difficult as he worked to rebuild their Abuela's home. He'd fended off their prying as best he could, when half his responses amounted by necessity to "I don't know."

Still, exhaustion is no excuse to be lax, and he curses himself once he realizes. He has a tail.

As he alters his route to pass through one of the still-ruined neighborhoods, ducking through the skeleton of a ruined building that might've once been a coffee shop, he's furious. He pockets a shard of ceramic, angry now that he hadn't thought to bring more than a handgun. He's cutting corners. Forgetting his mission. Failing at the most basic of tasks.

(Stay alive. Stay free.)

It's not the usual people, either, he soon realizes. His hackles raise as his eyes search for a staircase, or a fire escape; some way to get to higher ground, feeling keenly threatened now. There _had_ been an agent tailing him, stalking him skillfully through the back-alleys, but she'd gone without him noticing. He'd known about her for days, pegging her as non-HYDRA and non-threatening. Someone to keep an eye on. This one is different, quieter, and a suspicion niggles at him that he doesn't like—

The Soldier doubles back, circling around to his previous route by stealthier means. Hunting, now.

He finds the agent dead with a knife in her throat and curses himself. Not HYDRA, as he'd suspected; he kneels over her and closes her eyes, feeling a pang of what might be regret. Lightly armed and armored, no tacky emblems. No ID at all. Collapsed over a back-alley staircase, she could almost pass for an unfortunate civilian, except that the Soldier recognizes her from brief glimpses snatched over his shoulder. He'd almost started to grow fond of her, over the past few days. Unlike the HYDRA agents, she was unobtrusive.

Whoever she was, though, she died a quick death. Someone got the jump on her, quick and precise. The Soldier could almost admire their skill, except they killed his tail and he doesn't know _why_.

Is it another recovery team, come to fetch him?

...A strike team?

There's a scuff of shoes, someone letting themselves be heard, and the Soldier turns very deliberately around. He doesn't like unknown quantities, especially when they come wielding knives.

The man who waits is not at all what he'd expected, but the Soldier takes him in calmly. Tall. Dark-haired. Odd, elaborate leather armor. To a sixth sense which the Soldier has come to recognize, he practically stinks of HYDRA. The Soldier adjusts his grip on his improvised shank, eying the stranger up and down for weapons, or ID, or any sign of threat. The man does likewise, tilting his head with a curious lack of tension. As the silence stretches, his lips quirk.

"You're not quite what I expected," he finally says, accent strange. Foreign.

The Soldier says nothing.

"Then again, I'm not certain what I expected," the man continues, grinning in a flash of teeth. "Forgive me. I wouldn't normally drop in like this, but I couldn't help taking an interest in you. You are _such_ an exciting conundrum."

The Soldier squints, visibly unimpressed.

Whoever this guy is, he's making no effort to appear threatening. That doesn't mean he isn't, though. There's a gleam in his eye that the Soldier doesn't like, and he's too confident for a man who is blatantly unarmed. The Soldier senses a concealed weapon or two about his person—knives, likely, given his MO, but he wouldn't put a handgun or even a grenade past him, for some reason. He reads "wildcard."

As the man seems to await some response, eyebrows slightly raised, the Soldier adjusts his stance in readiness.

"Ah," he murmurs, as if realizing something. "I see. Do you feel threatened?" He spreads his arms.

The Soldier scowls, eyes flickering deliberately to the agent he'd killed. The man just chuckles. "You do. How unexpectedly quaint."

At that, something between his shoulder blades itches. That laugh irks him. He doesn't reach for the handgun, but lets his metal hand clench into a fist, and flips the shank to a backhand grip. Those are weapons enough, even for some weirdo. Even when that weirdo killed his tail.

The man rolls his eyes and sighs, realizing that no response is forthcoming. "Very well. Look. I assure you, dear soldier, I mean you no harm—but this would go more smoothly if you'd speak." He sounds frustrated. "Perhaps a greeting, at the very least?"

Why are HYDRA agents are always so chatty?

For a second, as the Soldier holds his ground, he considers responding. But then the man curses and reaches for something, and instinct takes over; the Soldier lunges, shank diving in for a pale neck, halted inches away by a grip like solid steel as the man _moves_. Green eyes narrow, suddenly very close, and the Soldier grits his teeth.

"Was that necessary?"

Scowling, he tries to brace down with both hands at a sudden, terrible certainty that this man was sent to _retrieve_ him. His handlers _were_ always the mocking ones—

"I wouldn't do that if I were you." The man's expression goes dark, grip tightening as he fights back against the Soldier, his strength more than human. Jerking away, the Soldier's breathing quickens as he gets nowhere; he twists and punches with his metal hand instead, catching the man in the gut, then under the chin. It earns a grunt, but he still doesn't release the Soldier's arm and blocks a knee to boot. The Soldier panics.

No. _No._ Not again.

"Look," the man gasps, "I said—"

Squeezing his wrist proves much more effective.

The man flinches, eyes widening, and metal fingers dig deep into resilient flesh before it finally gives, releasing the Soldier. The crude shank dives in for flesh—

His hands are suddenly empty, center of balance shifting. He doesn't stumble. At a curse from behind him, he spins and throws his shank with unerring accuracy, other hand reaching for his gun, drawing it before he even registers the flash of movement in front of him. Then the man is in his face, angry, and the Soldier brings the gun up under his chin only for it to be batted away. He punches instead, lashing out, hurling the man away with the metal arm and bringing the gun back up to fire.

The bullet glances off. The man freezes, knelt on the ground, and brings his hands up swiftly. "Wait!"

The Soldier almost fires again, then, adrenaline racing through him. But part of him recognizes the gesture as one of peace, and part of him also realizes that he's fallen back so very easily onto instinct. That thought halts him on principle. Might not even be effective to shoot, anyway. The Soldier's mind races, but he camps down on the instinct to take the shot while he has it—avoid the armor, some type of bulletproof fiber? Experimental?

As the man eyes him in open hesitation, the Soldier grits his teeth and grates; "What do you want?"

It's an impatient demand at best. Something flickers in the man's expression as the Soldier speaks for the first time, and the Soldier tenses further, bracing. The man eyes him from head to toe again and slowly stands; the Soldier lets him with a twitch of anticipation, needing to be sure.

"I want to talk," the man says slowly. Cautious. "I wish to offer a proposal, if you are willing, that is all. Truly, I meant no harm."

The Soldier glances at his dead tail again. "No harm?"

"To you," the man clarifies. For some reason, the Soldier doesn't buy it. "She was gathering information on you, my dear soldier. Consider it a gesture of goodwill, perhaps, that I eliminated her."

Face going carefully blank, the Soldier zeroes in on the man's forehead. He doesn't. "Who are you?"

The man's eyes narrow. For a second he seems almost confused, but it clears into something approaching shrewdness, and he inches forward. "I'm surprised you don't know." He regains some of his former smugness, and the Soldier tenses. "It makes sense, though, I suppose. The Winter Soldier," he drawls.

The Soldier goes still, and he takes the opportunity to advance. "There is much you don't know about the world, isn't there? About yourself. Much, I think, that you would... like to?"

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," the Soldier warns, voice hard.

The man only grins. "My dear soldier, you _really_ ought to hear me out. There is much I could offer you." He shifts, subtly. "I—"

The Soldier fires.

Hand frozen where he'd been reaching for something, the man curses in the split second before the gun goes off, face twisting up in frustration. He's gone before the bullet lands, vanishing in a flash of green and gold light.

The Soldier waits a moment, cataloguing the phenomenon. Mind racing. Then, in paranoia, he lowers the gun and glances around.

Whoever the fuck that guy was, he doesn't care. Maybe HYDRA. Maybe some other agency, or even an independent. Either way, someone would've heard that gun going off, and he's not ready to be found yet. Locating the bullet casing with brisk efficiency, he holsters the gun, covers his tracks and then vaults to grab a fire escape, climbing it to make his way to the rooftops.

The Soldier is used to being hunted. He won't sleep this night.

He goes to ground.


End file.
